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Stranger Things Season 3 ended with the kids battling the Mind Flayer, following which the group had to part ways. Eleven left Hawkins with the Byers on an emotional note. Season 4 is set six months after the horrifying incident at the Starcourt Mall.

The new stills show almost all the central characters of the Netflix series who are set to take on “a new and horrifying supernatural threat”. Jim Hopper, who was shown locked up in a Russian jail in the show’s previous teaser, will return too.

The synopsis of Stranger Things Season 4 reads, “It’s been six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time – and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.”

Netflix had earlier revealed that Season 4 will be set in four different locations. And it looks like Eleven, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lukas, Max and other group members will fight the enemy from different corners to put an end to the Upside Down.

Stranger Things creators Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer had earlier said the fourth season is “darker with a horror movie vibe”. On the podcast Present Company With Krista Smith, Ross said, “They (fans) will be happy when they see it. It’s very, very long, which is why it’s taking us a very long time.” The Duffer Brothers also hinted that several fan theories are “startlingly” accurate.

Stranger Things Season 4 stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Cara Buono and Matthew Modine.

I watched The Batman on Friday, and I wanted to let it stew in my mind for a couple of days to eliminate or at least minimise the recency bias I tend to have with Bat-movies. Nope, I still genuinely believe this is the finest Batman movie about Batman, instead of a film that just happens to have him in it.

A dark, beautiful, visceral detective thriller with noirish style, imagery, and influences, The Batman is as much a superhero movie as The Green Mile was a prison movie — which is to say, not very much. Its hero does not have any special abilities beyond money, gadgets and expertise at physical combat. The main ‘supervillain’, a new version of the often cartoonish Riddler (played by Paul Dano), is essentially a serial killer in the vein of the Zodiac Killer, similarly confounding his pursuers with clues, ciphers and puzzles.

which began with Keaton’s Batman, has reached its logical culmination. Gotham City in The Batman is a living, breathing character in itself. A dingy, rain-soaked, , decaying metropolis, grotesque in an almost Lovecraftian way, has been depicted by cinematographer Grieg Fraser (who wowed us in Dune not long ago) in stunning, stark colours — lurid orange on black, for instance. It’s lovely with a grim beauty of its own, but is also also daunting. A place you would wish to know more about, but from a safe distance. The film does not show Arkham Asylum, but it is likely a haunted house with gibbering demons as its demons.

Although pretty stylised, Gotham feels real and lived-in. It is easy to accept the claim that the law enforcement exists merely on paper, and cops are either helpless or paid off by the underworld. Thugs have infested its street and it’s essentially ruled by mobsters.

The criminal elements of Gotham are, however, afraid to go out at night, because the Batman also operates in the dark. The way Reeves and Fraser introduce Battinson is more akin to a boogeyman in a full-fledged horror movie than a hero.

More than most who have tackled the character, Reeves knows exactly what makes him so terrifying to criminals. We know he is just a man who dresses up as a bat, but for the more nefarious residents of Gotham, he is a myth, a phantom lurking in the dark, a symbol of a city that has had enough and is fighting back with a vengeance. Even his Batmobile emerges out of the shadows like an elemental monster, leading to one of the most riveting car chase scenes since The Dark Knight

Robert Pattinson earned his spurs by playing psychologically complex, driven characters in indie movies, cementing his status as a versatile, all round brilliant actor. It’s like throughout his career he’s been working towards the Batman. Because in the cape and cowl, he is absolutely tremendous, vanishing completely into the role and giving a version of the character that is both familiar and unique. His physicality, mannerisms, and even using his fearsome appearance to quietly intimidate people is, well, classic Batman.

But without the costume, Bruce Wayne appears to be a haunted, tortured man on the verge of psychological collapse, his eyes every now and then betraying the bottled-up rage inside him. With mask removed and eye-makeup visible, he looks like a racoon, his vulnerability palpable. Unlike the Bruce we know from say, the Dark Knight trilogy, with all his charm and faux frivolous playboy persona, this one is dishevelled with untidy hair, mirroring the grungy quality of his city.

A clear dichotomy between the two public personas — Batman and Bruce Wayne — is missing, and might bother the purists, but this is a very personal portrayal of the character. It can be explained by the fact that this is still a Batman-in-training, and would in future develop a public persona for Bruce Wayne — or Gothamites will put two and two together and figure out his secret identity.

Batman’s most reliable ally, James Gordon, a lieutenant at this point, is played by with uncharacteristic composure by Jeffrey Wright, who should really narrate a few audiobooks in free time. The portrayal is both compelling and distinct from Gary Oldman’s always-on-edge Gordon in Nolan movies. He is also not intimidated by Batman, and amusingly, calls him ‘man’ (as in ‘whatever you want, man’), as though the superhero were his unruly partner.

Zoe Kravitz makes for an excellent Catwoman, with just the right combination of sass, wit, and vulnerability. Her fighting style is suitably feline and thankfully not over the top, and the relationship that she and Batman develop across the course of the movie is organic and has both physical attraction and scepticism we are familiar with in the comics.

It is a perennial problem in even great superhero movies that the heroes are overshadowed by their villains. The Dark Knight is possibly the greatest movie based on comic-book characters, but it is more of a Joker movie than a Batman one. Here, in The Batman, the superhero has three foes to face, each bring their own flavour to the story. John Torturro as crime boss Carmine Falcone is clearly having the time of his life. He is a joy in every scene So is Colin Farrell as the Penguin, as many have noted, is slathered with layers of makeup, prosthetics, and a fat-suit, and bring a few little moments of levity to a mostly gloomy story.

But it is the Riddle, eerily believable as a disturbed-loner-turned-serial-killer who is the Big Bad, playing Batman and Gordon like a fiddle. He and Batman cancel each other out for are two sides of the same coin. Both use varying degrees of violence against the corrupt to achieve their goals — only the Riddler has no qualms killing. When he and Batman finally end up in the same room, their uneasy chemistry gives the payoff for all those procedural scenes that came before. The superhero completes his arc from an angsty seeker of vengeance to a symbol of hope and the protector of Gotham City.

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But such is the Snyder’s Cult. He has some of the most passionate fans you will ever see, who had been clamouring (and petitioning) Warner Bros to release the original vision of the filmmaker ever since Justice League landed with a thud (dud?) in November 2017.

Snyder had to leave the first DC team up live-action movie due to a family tragedy and Joss Whedon, who was already attached as a screenwriter, took over his duties. The released movie was said to be more Whedon than Snyder.

The Snyder Cut movement took off.

Also known for comic-book projects like 300, Watchmen, and Batman v Superman, Snyder appears to either inspire slavish devotion or utter scorn. For me, I did not think much of him despite liking his DC movies — for the most part. But my opinion changed considerably with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which, while flawed, was a true-blue superhero epic of gargantuan proportions. The scale was akin to a pastiche of a classic mythological epic come alive.

Even at four hours, and a few indulgences and idiosyncrasies, it felt decently-paced. This time, the characters, particularly the minor ones like the Flash and Cyborg, had much more depth. Most of all, the transpiring events did not have that weightless feeling that was there in earlier DC movies by Snyder.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League told a familiar compelling story of godlike invaders from outer space fighting godlike heroes on earth, and had at its thematic underpinnings of loss and redemption, something Snyder clearly understood more than most after the tragedy that had forced him to abandon the project in the first place.

The film, it seemed, was not directed by somebody who made the macho, grimdark superheroes of Batman v Superman, but a man softened by a calamitous event in his life.

But it was mainly the visuals that sold the movie for even his detractors. The 2017 Justice League, now understood to be more a Whedon film than Snyder, was a mishmash of two, conflicting visions, and felt so. The final act, set in a Russian village, looked like an extended video-game cutscene with its garish hues and low-resolution visuals, except games look a lot better.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League was another story. Every frame of the film was so lovingly crafted that it was criminal for the studio not to allow the film a theatrical release. Forget set pieces, even scenes involving characters in conversation with each other had a heft, a cinematic feeling of being there, a credibility, that makes the film a cut above the rest.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is no fluke. Snyder has always had a distinct visual flair, and even if one doesn’t like the way his characters, story and dialogue are written, he has a knack for creating memorable images. He and fellow superhero filmmaker Chloe Zhao belong to the Terrence Malick school of art direction given their free-roaming use of camera and clever use of light.

A lot of Snyder’s shots stick in your mind long after you have seen the movie. Case in point: the Superman-Day of the Dead moment in BvS, in which the Man of Steel saves a girl from a burning building and is treated as Jesus’ Second Coming by the people standing around him. That image burns itself in your brain, and it takes great care and artistry in actualising such moments, something that is rare in Hollywood.

Another similarly unforgettable visual moment comes in the same movie when Wonder Woman arrives to assist Superman and Batman in their battle against Doomsday in Batman v Superman, which for my money is the best live-action superhero entrance ever. We do not not see what has stopped Doomsday’s X-Ray vision attack at first. Then, Diana’s shield slowly materialises, its metallic surface gleaming with ethereal light. The superhero rises from behind the shield, her hair blowing wildly in the wind, and burning debris all around her. Aided by Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme, it is an incredibly powerful moment, fit for somebody who is literally a Greek goddess.

Compare that to the Avengers movies and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Despite their massive success, how many visually interesting shots can MCU fans recall off the top of their head? Only a few movies like Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame have a unique visual identity. Most of the rest, at least in purely visual terms, look almost identical to each other.

But what about the opposite of this theory? Who’s to blame when every performance in a project is uniformly terrible? Is this the director’s fault? Or do the problems, especially in a writer’s medium like television, begin at the script stage?

There are no clear answers, but when you watch a show like Prime Video’s Bestseller— a tribute of sorts to Hindi pulp fiction, just like Haseen Dillruba and Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein—you don’t blame mere mortals. You direct your anger towards the gods.

Forget pointing fingers at the director (Mukul Abhyankar), but even Meryl Streep couldn’t polish this script, written by Anvita Dutt (Bulbbul, uh oh) and Althea Kaushal, who has to her credit films such as Happy New Year, the Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Game, and Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor. A formidable record.

I never thought Prime Video would put out anything as deplorable as Breathe: Into the Shadows ever again. Tandav and The Forgotten Army came close, but Bestseller’s all-consuming ineptitude goes beyond just Amazon. It might truly be one of the worst originals ever produced by any mainstream Indian streamer. And I’ve sampled Ullu and Hoichoi titles.

Only Gauahar Khan somehow manages to escape relatively unscathed by this mess, which also features Shruti Haasan, Arjan Bajwa, Satyajeet Dubey and Mithun Chakraborty, who is top-billed, but shows up for the first time only in episode three.

Four episodes (of eight in total) were provided for preview. And it feels like they were written in less time than what it would take for you to watch them. Shrilly performed, bafflingly structured, and aggressively poor in every possible department, Bestseller has the gall to call itself a ‘fast-paced, gritty and intense psychological thriller’. But every minute feels like five, and every line of dialogue feels like a personal insult.

And it’s not like the show gets worse as it goes along. It tells you exactly how bad it is in the first five minutes, which is crammed with exposition so clunky that it makes Aranyak seem like Sacred Games by comparison. It’s almost as if Bestseller was written not by human beings, but by a bot who’d been fed a screenwriting ‘kunji’.

Every character announces what they do for a living when we first meet them, to people who should ideally already know. It’s so unnatural when writers deliver exposition in this manner, and it boggles my mind why so many of these desi streaming shows still do this. For instance, the pulp fiction novelist Tahir (Bajwa) tells his wife Mayanka (Khan) in their first scene together, “Tum 30 second ki ad banati ho, usme 2 second ka dimaag lagta hai, what do you know about writing a full-fledged book?” Why, thanks for telling us what your wife does, Tahir. But maybe we could’ve seen her in action instead? That would’ve conveyed this information too, perhaps a little more gracefully.

The premise, which I’ve clearly avoided talking about, involves Tahir—a terrible, terrible writer who happens to be a much worse person—and the mess that he gets himself into after stealing a fan’s manuscript and trying to pass it off as his own. Haasan plays the fan, Mithunda plays an ‘eccentric’ policeman, and Dubey plays a guy whose primary job seems to be looking into the camera at the end of every episode and deadpanning, “Chapter one,” and, “Chapter two,” and later, you guessed it, “Chapter three.”

I understand that ‘Mumbai noir’ is a thorny term in a post-Gehraiyaan world, but never has the genre been disrespected so tastelessly.

One of the highlights of the song is the lyrics, written by Sivakarthikeyan, which is likely to go right over the head of the listeners. The hook line of the song is ‘malama pitha pithadhe’ and it’s hard to tell what it means. One can’t even confidently tell if it has any base in the Arabic language. And that seems to be the fun part of the song. Composer Anirudh wants to make a point that as long as the music is enjoyable, people don’t sweat over incomprehensible lyrics. You see, music has no language.

The lyrical video also has a glimpse of Vijay and Pooja Hegde performing the hook step of “Arabic Kuthu”. It seems the makers wanted to unleash a social media trend among the fans. It is worth noting that when Vijay performed a few steps of the song “Vaathi Coming” during the audio release function of Master, it broke the internet.